Let’s be honest. In Scrum and product management, we love to build stuff. We get our backlogs in shape, order and prioritize like pros, and sprint our way to the Sprint Review with something shiny to show for it. But here’s a recurring problem we see: sometimes, okay, a lot of the time, we rarely actually stop to ask if we’re solving the right problem. If we even understand the problem to begin with.
Ever delivered a feature that technically worked, but no one really used? Or launched something you were sure customers would love, only to hear crickets and see tumbleweed rolling? Yeah, been there. The thing is not that we’re bad at what we do; it’s just that we often start with (and persist on) assumptions instead of curiosity. And we understand, it's because of many different reasons, like organizational pressure, misinterpreted metrics, etc, but let's get back to understanding problems.
Welcome to the Problem Discovery Zone
That’s where this fun little deck comes in. We're excited about it! We've been working on this for a while, and we have extensively tested it while teaching classes and helping our clients. Think of it as a game for your product brain. It’s designed to help teams change from “building what we think people want” to “digging until we understand what people actually need.”
We call them Problem Discovery Scenarios, and they’re basically mini-mysteries inspired by real-life product and business fails. Each scenario is a short, cryptic story with a hidden backstory. Your mission is to uncover the root problem, not solve it. In fact, we didn't provide the solution at all to lock you in on the problem.
So Why a Game?
Because discovery is a skill, and like any skill, it gets better with practice. But practicing discovery in the real world can be messy, risky, and a bit slow. This game gives you a low-stakes playground to flex your questioning muscles, build better instincts, and, honestly, just have fun. Although open questions are great, we limited the player to only asking closed questions to learn to connect the dots.
More importantly, it helps teams break out of a dangerous habit: confirmation bias. You know, when we subtly steer conversations to support what we already believe. This game forces you to stay open, curious, and just a little uncomfortable.
How It Works
There are two roles:
Problem Owner – You’ve got the card with the hidden mystery.
Consultant(s) – You ask smart, focused yes-or-no questions to figure out what’s really going on.
Each round lasts 12 minutes. That’s just enough time to explore, but not enough to wander off into solution-land. The Problem Owner reads the short teaser on the front of the card and says: “What’s going on?” That’s your cue to channel your inner detective.
From there, you fire off questions like:
“Is the user’s behavior causing the issue?”
“Does it have to do with how the feature is used?”
“Is the business model involved?”
No rambling, no brainstorming, no conversation, AND THUS no time to dive into solutioning. Just a clean yes-or-no question.
SPOILER ALERT:
The round ends when you’ve uncovered both:
the user impact (the orange bit), and
the business impact (the green bit).
If you hit both of those, congrats! You’ve solved the mystery. Well, understood it, anyway. (Solving comes later. We've got something else cooking for that.)
Why This Matters (More Than You Think)
Too often, product teams dive into delivery mode. It’s exciting! You’re delivering things! But speed isn’t much use if you’re running in the wrong direction. Problem discovery is the essential part of product management that should happen before building something. How can we gauge if we are successful or not?
This deck was born out of watching too many teams skip that part. We noticed:
Vague problem statements.
Superficial user research.
Endless delivery cycles chasing imaginary value (yet seems to please management, for some reason).
The game slows you down just enough to ask better questions. It helps you practice being wrong, which is a wildly underrated skill in product work.
What You'll Get Out of It
This isn’t just a team bonding activity (though it does that too). After a few rounds, you’ll start noticing real shifts in how your team talks about problems. You’ll hear:
Better framing of user needs. You'll become more concise.
More curiosity, less defensiveness.
Deeper thinking, faster. Connecting the dots.
You’re building a habit of healthy skepticism, exactly what you need when navigating the messy, ambiguous world of product discovery.
Final Thought
Remember that the person with the problem is always the expert on the problem. Not the solution. That flips a lot of product conversations on their head. We don't tell the stakeholder what their problem is, and they don't tell us what to build. The job of a product team isn’t to be the smartest people in the room. It’s to ask better questions. To dig deeper. To postpone judgment just long enough to understand. Every stakeholder wants one thing, and that's being understood.
If we can get you to that mindset with a game, why not?
So next time you’re tempted to jump straight into Jira, grab a coffee, gather your team, and pull out a scenario card instead. You might just discover the one thing standing between your roadmap... and real impact.
If we've made you curious about this deck (and our other related projects), feel free to reach out to either yours truly or Ryan Brook and learn how to obtain your deck! Graphics created by the wonderful Olina.